ere thoroughly nice people. Mary Hubbell was more
than thoroughly nice. She was a darb. She had done a completely good job
during the 1918-1918 period, including the expert driving of a wild and
unbroken Ford up and down the shell-torn roads of France. One of those
small-town girls with a big-town outlook, a well-trained mind, a slim
boyish body, a good clear skin, and a steady eye that saw. Mary Hubbell
wasn't a beauty by a good many measurements, but she had her points, as
witness the number of bouquets, bundles, books, and bon-bons piled in
her cabin when she sailed.

The well-trained mind and the steady seeing eye enabled Mary Hubbell to
discover that Europe wasn't so gay as it seemed to the blind; and she
didn't write home to the effect that you'd never know there'd been war.

The Hubbells had the best that Europe could afford. Orson J. Hubbell, a
mild-mannered, grey-haired man with a nice flat waist-line and a good
keen eye (hence Mary's) adored his women-folk and spoiled them. During
the first years of his married life he had been Hubbell, the drayman, as
Giddy Gory had said. He had driven one of his three drays himself,
standing sturdily in the front of the red-painted wooden two-horse wagon
as it rattled up and down the main business thoroughfare of Winnebago.
But the war and the soaring freight-rates had dealt generously with
Orson Hubbell. As railroad and shipping difficulties increased the
Hubbell draying business waxed prosperous. Factories, warehouses, and
wholesale business firms could be assured that their goods would arrive
promptly, safely, and cheaply when conveyed by a Hubbell van. So now
the three red-painted wooden horse-driven drays were magically
transformed into a great fleet of monster motor vans that plied up and
down the state of Wisconsin and even into Michigan and Illinois and
Indiana. The Orson J. Hubbell Transportation Company, you read. And
below, in yellow lettering on the red background:

Have HUBBELL Do Your HAULING.

There was actually a million in it, and more to come. The buying of the
old Gory house on the river bluff had been one of the least of Orson's
feats. And now that house was honeycombed with sleeping porches and
linen closets and enamel fittings and bathrooms white and glittering as
an operating auditorium. And there were shower baths, and blue rugs, and
great soft fuzzy bath towels and little white innocent guest towels
embroidered with curly H's whose tails writhed